THEY were married a month before the armistice, quietly with only Monsieur de Cyon and Lily and Jean and Hattie at the ceremony. It was the family once more (the remnants of the vigorous family which had once filled the drawing-room at Shane’s Castle) which dominated all else in fitting fashion at such events as births and deaths and weddings. Thérèse was not present, for Ellen had decided quickly and there was not time for her to return from New York. Nor was Rebecca there. A week before the wedding there had been a scene in which Rebecca played all her cards in a forlorn hope of winning the game against Callendar. She had told Ellen that she herself was a Jewess and knew what men like Callendar were like. She had told her that he was cruel and domineering and that all his patience, all his quiet aloofness only covered the steel of a will which she would come in time to know too well. She said that in the end he would do his best to destroy her, not alone as a musician but as a woman. And Ellen listened quietly, secure against it all in the knowledge of the new duty that lay before her. It was not until Rebecca in a perfect debauch of fury screamed at her, “He is marrying you only to break your will ... to destroy you. It is that which lies behind it all.... A conflict.... I know.... A conflict. He has wanted it all these years,” that Ellen grew white and terrifying and told her to go.
“I never want to see you again,” she said. “I am grateful for what you have done, but you cannot arrange all my life for me. What you say is a lie.... It isn’t true. You say it all because you can no longer plan my whole life.”
So Rebecca had gone, her bright ferret eyes red and savage. On the long stairs she met Callendar coming in but she did not so much as glance at him. In her heart she had not yet yielded the victory. She would defeat him in the end. Shewould let him defeat himself, for she knew he was certain to do it.
It was de Cyon himself who arranged the transfer of Callendar to the African service, and so it happened that they went to Tunis for the honeymoon to a villa on the outskirts of the city which belonged to one of Thérèse’s Greek cousins, a man who served as head of the Mediterranean banks of Leopopulos et Cie. Ellen wrote to them regularly, letters which were like all the others she had ever written her mother since that first one from the Babylon Arms, restrained, careful and filled with a host of details from which one could gather nothing, and at the end always the same comment on the weather and the beauty of their garden with a brief line to the effect that “we are well and happy.”
In the Rue Raynouard, Gramp lived the same life that he had lived for thirty years. He had his books (for Hattie was rich now and expense no longer mattered) and he had his rocking chair placed absurdly among the Empire furniture of the room which Lily had given him. Nothing had changed save that his windows looked out upon a garden laid out by Le Nôtre and that he could hear the whistles of the boats on the Seine and that he went sometimes afoot on solitary expeditions through the neighboring streets, once as far as the Invalides. It was his habit to steal away secretly through the gate in the garden wall leading into the Rue de Passy. He remained inscrutable, uncommunicative and aloof, save with Jean for whom he displayed a fancy. And none of them knew that the thing he was looking for on these solitary meanderings was a youth which had returned to him now with an unearthly clarity, though there were moments when he was childish and could not remember that he was in Paris or what had happened to him only yesterday.
And Hattie, living now with Lily, began slowly to regain her interest in life. She took to inspecting the big house room byroom to see that it was properly cared for; she quarreled in a stifled, incoherent fashion with Augustine and the other servants; she fussed about the garden, insensible to its beauty, and interested only in its order. She even undertook after a time to do the marketing herself when she discovered with horror that the shopkeepers paid old Mélanie the housekeeper a commission on what she purchased.
So Lily, for a third time, turned over the possession of her house to another. Madame Gigon had once treated it as her own and after her César and Ellen had quarreled over it. And now, willingly, she delivered it into the keeping of Hattie who had greater need of it than any of the others. She told the servants that they must not mind Madame Tolliver’s eccentric behavior and she made up to old Mélanie the amount of her commissions. But even if she had not done these things, they would not have left her, for Lily understood servants and had a way with them. Old Mélanie had been with her for more than twenty years, since Lily had come to Madame Gigon, a little frightened but resolved, none the less, never to marry Jean’s father.
SABINE, in her defeat, did not complain. In all the business of the divorce, she conducted herself as she had always done, with an amazing control; so that no one, not even Thérèse, was able to discover whether she was willing or not to release the pretense of a possession she had held over Callendar for so many years. They talked it over quite calmly, arranging all the details in the most business-like and efficient fashion, under the guidance of that short, frumpy, powerful old woman, Thérèse, who appeared to know the law as thoroughly as she knew the world of banking. There was no word spoken in anger or inhaste. The withdrawal of Sabine from the position of wife was executed with as superb an air of indifference as her entrance into the rôle.
“I want no settlement and no allowance,” she had said as the three of them sat about the tea table in the small sitting room of the house in the Avenue du Bois. “Whatever you care to do for little Thérèse is, of course, your own affair. She is yours as much as mine. (A lie, she thought, because they did not care for her at all.) I have all I want.”
And the leave-taking had been like the departure of a woman from the office of her lawyer. There was no anger and there were no tears. Sabine rose and said, “I will go now.... I have taken a house in the Rue Tilsit. I shall be there in case you want me. I do not know the telephone but I will send it to you.”
Thérèse bent over the table and, gathering up the papers with her fat glittering fingers, thrust them into the reticule in which she kept her important documents ... a moldy old bag continually in a state of confusion, from which she was able by a sort of magic to produce on a moment’s notice any paper she required. As she sat watching her, it occurred to Sabine that the old woman’s Levantine blood had begun to claim her entirely. It was not only the diamonds and emeralds which now stood in need of cleaning; the heavy black clothes which Thérèse wore even in the hottest weather were now sometimes stained and discolored, and she had taken to carrying fragments of biscuits among the papers of her reticule, which she took out from time to time and nibbled with the furtive air of a fat squirrel. She was more near-sighted than ever and squinted up her eyes until they became mere slits through which appeared the glitter of two tiny brilliant lights. All the charm was slipping slowly away from her eccentricity; the queer abrupt manner, which in the height of her power had seemed amusing and original, was slowly turning into the queerness of an untidy old Greek woman.
Watching her, she thought, “God willing, I shall never turninto such a grubby old woman. I shall care for myself to the very end. I shall die, handsomely dressed, with my hair in perfect order and with my corsets on. She is a Levantine after all. She might be an old woman with a fruit stand in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge.”
(Thérèse with the glitter in her dark almond eyes, poking about in a reticule that contained a vast fortune in securities.)
Callendar walked with her through the comic opera hallway and out to her motor where, with a great courtliness, he saw her step in and closed the door after her.
“Good-by,” he murmured quietly. “If there is anything you want, let me know.”
So although for a time it had seemed that all the cards were turning up for her, she had in the end lost her game of patience. She had lost it, she reflected, to Ellen Tolliver whom she had neglected to respect sufficiently—a crude, uncivilized mountebank brought in to amuse the guests in the house on Murray Hill. What was the secret that lay behind all the mystery?
As the motor drove away, it occurred to her that the parting had been like one between strangers. She had been to them, then, nothing at all; she might have been a clerk employed in some branch of the Leopopulos bank, a creature who had been of use to them and whom they sent away when her usefulness was ended, willing to pension her if she desired it, like an old family employee. More than twelve years she had given to them ... years in which she tried, desperately, heart-breakingly to establish some bond that was too strong to be broken in this cold, matter-of-fact fashion. More than twelve years she had struggled against something which was stronger, far stronger, than her own will and self-possession. And now they sent her away without more than a formal good-by.... Thérèse had her fortune still, vaster than it had ever been. Nothing else mattered.
She took out the mirror from the side of her motor and fell to examining her face. Here at least the twelve years had nottaken the toll that might have been expected. There was no gray in the brick-red hair that lay under the small, chic gray hat. The narrow intelligent eyes, set close together, were as bright as they had ever been, and the white skin, like the thick petals of a camelia, was as perfect as ever beneath the superbly disguised powder and rouge. She touched the tip of her long nose with an immaculately gloved finger, and it occurred to her that the face which looked out of the tiny rectangle of glass was a mask, really,—an admirably fashioned mask which concealed effectively a turbulence none would ever have imagined lay beneath it. They managed things better in these days: once she would have been expected to retire from the field with a broken heart, to exploit, as it were, her own suffering; to swoon and weep ... like Lady Byron.
She looked, she felt, remarkably young; but not young enough. She could not, she thought, begin all over again; there was not time. She was past forty now. She might marry again ... a man her own age or older, but that would not be the same. She had given what youth she possessed (beneath that hard, controlled exterior) to Callendar and Thérèse. There was not a chance of her ever being young in the way she had once been, of loving with a fierce abandon that her pride had forced her to conceal. (She fancied that they had never discovered how much and how shamefully she had loved him, yet she could not be certain. Probably he knew this too.)
She put away the mirror and, leaning back, fell to thinking, with all her cold honesty, that she would even return to him now if he so much as lifted a finger in her direction. There had been in all their life together no memory of a violent scene, no memory of blows or accusations ... nothing about which she could build up a hatred or sense of repulsion. There had been nothing since little Thérèse was born save that aloof, courteous indifference which it had been impossible to shatter. And for a time she tried to imagine what would have happened if once—only once—he had for a moment melted and behaved toward her as if she had been more than a mere institution, more than a wife whom one protected and to whom one was always courteous.
And old Thérèse.... Once Sabine had fancied that they were friends. They had been, she remembered, congenial, almost alike in their point of view, in the angle from which they looked out upon the world. And then Thérèse had slipped away, slowly, imperceptibly in a fashion that it was impossible to define. There had been no quarrel, no bandying of words, yet they had come somehow to hate each other, coldly and with an ironic polish. She knew what it was that had come between them. It was that fortune and the need of an heir. And now in the end Thérèse was becoming slowly an untidy, disgusting old Levantine woman helpless in the power of her obsession.
If she had not married Callendar she might have been a friend even now, not alone of Thérèse but of Callendar himself. But that would have been unbearable ... much worse than this. At least in this there was a sense of finality.
So she tried as she had tried many times before, to pull those twelve years apart and pick from among the ruins the elements which had been the heart of her passion for him; but she found it impossible. She could not say why she would have returned to him now if he had asked her. Over all the years there hung a faint aura of evil (an evil which she told herself was not evil at all, but simply seemed so because she had been brought up to believe that sort of love was evil). It was desire which she felt, perhaps nothing more than that; yet it was, she was certain, not such a simple and uncomplicated thing. It was sinister, perhaps entangled in all her passion forknowingwhat people were, for taking them apart (she smiled to herself) to look at the works. No, this mystery was quite beyond her....
So (she thought) in the end she had not been able to compete with Ellen Tolliver. He would have her now, as he had always wanted to have her. She (Sabine) had then not been so wrongin the instinct that led her, years before, to call at the house in Rue Raynouard. There had been nothing to discover, and yet everything. What was true now of Callendar and Ellen Tolliver was true then, as they sat in the long beautiful drawing-room, just as true as it had been in the days when the girl had come to the house on Murray Hill. It was only that they themselves had changed and here (she thought almost with satisfaction) might lie the seeds of one more disaster. For Lilli Barr could not possibly be the same as the awkward, obscure Ellen Tolliver, and Callendar had hardened slowly in all the qualities which made him impossible. Ellen Tolliver would not submit to the unhappiness she herself had known; Ellen Tolliver would not wait patiently to achieve her own desire. She was capable of stormy scenes; she had clearly a genius for success, for having her own way. He had, perhaps, in all his watching never discovered this. And yet, as she thought it over and over on the drive to the Rue Tilsit, it occurred to her that it might be just this and nothing more that was the very core of that inexplicable, persistent attraction between them.
Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She kept repeating the name to herself. She still felt no resentment. If she herself could not have Callendar, there was no reason why Lilli Barr should not have him. There was, she knew, nothing more to be done.
The voice of Amedé, the driver, roused her as he opened the door. She stepped out, bade him wait for orders, and turning, she saw little Thérèse standing in the window with the governess. It reminded her that she must see Thérèse’s friend Ella Nattatorini about the lease for the house at Houlgate.... The sea would do little Thérèse good. And there were servants to be engaged and the packing to be done....
The ocean of small things which made it possible to endure unhappiness rose and swept over her.
THE news of the wedding came to Sabine the following autumn while she was staying in Newport. Even the war had not crowded out of the journals an event of such interest. The bride, she read, was well known to the public as a pianist. She had described herself as Ellen Tolliver, American by birth, age thirty-four years. (It was the first time that the world knew Lilli Barr was American, for Rebecca and the forgotten Schneidermann had done their work well.) The bridegroom was prominent and the member of many clubs, the last of his family, and had not lived in America for more than ten years. He was a captain in the French army and would be stationed in Tunis where they were to spend the honeymoon.
Laying aside theTimesand resuming her breakfast, she discovered that her only response to the news was one of shock at the haste with which the wedding had followed the divorce. It was almost as if they said that all these years she had stood between them, and now that Callendar was free, they must lose no time. Vaguely she felt that she should feel insulted. It was not until evening, when she drove over to dine with Mrs. Champion at The Cedars, that the sense of depression abated a little.
It was a gloomy place—the Cedars—built in the Seventies in the ornate style in favor at that time, and the presence of Mrs. Champion and the Virgins did nothing to raise the tone. Janey and Margaret (it seemed to her when she saw them in the dark cool rooms that she had known them always) were, as she calculated it, now forty-two and forty-five respectively and had reached the stage in which any spark that may have dwelt within their narrow-chested frames was now sublimated into an interest in garden clubs and work among the sailors. Things had changed ... enormously, but Janey and Margaret had gone on and on, living in the gloomy Cedars with their mother, perpetually shocked and stimulated by the stories of the oil magnates and financial adventurers who had taken possession of the Casino. It was thesestories which provided the opening barrage of conversation at dinner.
“There is one woman who they say gives enormous parties,” Janey told her at dinner, “who was once the cook for a cousin of Mrs. Mallinson.”
They assured her, although she knew it well enough, that Newport was not the same. It had lost its tone; and in losing it (thought Sabine) it had left Mrs. Champion and the Virgins far behind. Bishop Smallwood, the Apostle to the Genteel, who came sometimes to spend a week with his “wa’am friend” Mrs. Champion, shared their disgust on Sabine’s right and expressed properly outraged sentiments.
If America were anything, Sabine thought, over her guinea fowl, it was change ... change ... change. And God help those who didn’t keep up with it! All the conversation gave her a curious sense of having passed poor Janey and Margaret and the Apostle and left them far behind. They seemed very far away. She felt that she was being kind to them in having come to dine at The Cedars. And once Mrs. Champion’s word had been law in that tight little world which was now exploded, leaving them stranded, remote and helpless and pitiful, pretending all the while that it wastheirworld, after all, which really counted.
She knew that they would find a bitter triumph in the news that had come with the morningTimes, for they could not have forgotten how she stole Richard Callendar (by the lucky turn of events which they would never know) from under the noses of all of them. There had been so little excitement in their lives; certainly they had not forgotten, certainly they would not miss an opportunity for which they had waited so long. Yet they seemed so remote and negligible to her that she did not even wince when at last Mrs. Champion sidled up to the subject.
She was able to tell them and Bishop Smallwood, who in the decline of the season was fairly panting for gossip, that Lilli Barrwasthe same girl who had played at that scandalous party of Thérèse Callendar’s. (Did they remember the naked Javanese—or was it Senegalese—dancer? asked Mrs. Champion. She had commanded Janey and Margaret to shield their faces with their fans). Lilli Barrwasthe same girl with whom Richard Callendar had lunched so many times in the open window at Sherry’s. She saw fit to pass over the implication, thrust in slyly by Mrs. Champion, that he was making the girl, after so many years, an honest woman. Because she herself did not really know.
And speaking of the divorce, she remarked brazenly, “It was all settled without difficulty. I knew that he was planning to marry her. We talked it over and thought it the best solution.”
At which Mrs. Champion shook her head and made a clucking sound to indicate, as clearly as she dared, that the cold-blooded behavior of Sabine’s generation in such matters was obscene and immoral. And the Apostle to the Genteel, in obeisance to his high church opinions and his disapproval of divorce, looked gravely and silently into the depths of his sherbet, but with an air of believing that there was much to be said on both sides. (It would not be wise to offend so rich and fashionable a woman as Sabine Callendar.) Janey and Margaret only stared at her, with the round, stupid eyes of little girls.
And when she left (a little after nine when she could endure the party no longer) Mrs. Champion was able at last to deliver the blow which she had held in reserve all the evening. As they stood in the porte cochère waiting for Sabine’s motor to come up, she murmured under the protection of the darkness, “I could have warned you long ago, my dear. You should never have married Richard Callendar. If you had a mother—” She sighed and continued. “I should never have allowed Janey or Margaret to accept a proposal from him.”
Such a speech would have made her angry once and have aroused the sharp tongue for which she had been famous; but it made no difference to her now, save that it amused her to think of Janey or Margaret standing there, a pair of Alices in Wonderland, as the wife of Richard. And she reflected that she possessed an experience which they would never know. It was better to have beenthe wife of Callendar than to have dried up in the pale, shriveled fashion of Janey and Margaret (and they had been pretty once, in a silly, pink and white fashion). And she knew, with a curious pang of pity, that as they stood there in the shadow of their powerful mother, they too were thinking the same thing. They had never escaped that dowdy, stupid old woman....
“Good night,” she said. “I shan’t see you again. I am sailing on Friday.”
And then for the first time in her life, the wall of cold common sense collapsed and she exposed herself deliberately to the peril of boredom. “If you do decide to come to Paris, Janey, you must pay me a visit.” For there was something unbearable to her in the thought of Janey, free for the first time from the dominion of her mother, alone in Paris. It would be like a bird set free which no longer knows how to fly....
In the darkness Janey stammered and gushed like a girl of seventeen (Janey who would never see forty again), “It’s kind of you, Sabine. It’s wonderful. You see I’ve never been in Paris before without mother ... and I wouldn’t know just what to do ... I’ll come.” And she subsided into a chaos of maidenly gurglings.
But as Sabine drove away from the barren shadows of the Cedars, she reproached herself for having succumbed so weakly. Something had happened to her. A year ago she would not have done such a stupid thing.... “Perhaps,” she thought, above the distant roar of the surf, “I am growing old....”
As the months passed and she returned to Paris—a Paris gay and gaudy with the excitement of the last days of the peace conference—she came to understand the satisfaction which lies of knowing that a thing is finished. She would no longer go through the torture of seeing Callendar day after day, always at hand and yet remote as the summit of a cold mountain peak. All that was over, finished; and in the sense of finality there was peace. Until now she had never known how terribly the monstrous house inthe Avenue du Bois had oppressed her. It was only since she had her own house in the Rue Tilsit, a house filled with all the exquisite things she cherished and which meant so much to her, that she understood completely the torture of the house which she had called “a sort of World’s Fair exhibit.”
For she had never, in all the years of their life together, been able to escape from it. Always Callendar had resisted silently, quietly in the way he had, until she had come in the end to accept the place without complaint. She had been silent in the hope that he might appreciate her silence and her virtue in submitting to his will. But he had simply taken it as a matter of course. She had never been able properly to entertain because the house was so awful that one could not even forget its shame in the hollow pretense that it was bizarre and consequently chic. And she knew now beyond all doubt that he liked the house. It satisfied him in the way it satisfied his mother. And she understood that he belonged in it just as Thérèse belonged there, more than ever since her Levantine blood had come into its own.
There in the Rue Tilsit, in her own house, among the things chosen by her own fastidious taste, she began once more to take up her own life, to descend from the unreal, extravagant level of the Callendars to a plane where she might exist in her proper relation to all about her. For more than twelve years, she came to realize, her life had not been her own, even for a moment. It had been Callendar’s to do with as he chose.... She had been his possession. It was only now that she was beginning again to be free....
In the beginning, after that day when she had said good-by so formally to Richard and his mother, when all the arrangements had been completed and Thérèse had stuffed all her papers back into her reticule, she could not bring herself to reënter the house, even to return for the possessions—pictures, bits of jade and silver and silk—which she had left behind her. It was only now, long afterward, when she had come to feel the full sense of her freedom that she considered going to fetch them.
At last, after she had been in Paris for weeks, she rang up the house and learning from Victorine that it was empty and that no one was expected (Thérèse was in London, Victorine told her, and Richard and Ellen still in Tunis) she arranged to call for the things late that afternoon.
IT was a cold gray afternoon in the spring when the sun, breaking through the clouds, picked out for brief moments the faint green on the trees of the little park in the Avenue du Bois. Side by side the white houses stood, withdrawn a little from the street, flamboyant yet cold, ornate but barren. Sabine, watching them from the window of her tiny motor, was thankful again in a comfortable indefinite fashion that she had escaped from their insufferable pomp into the tiny, exquisite house in the Rue Tilsit.
Of late she had come at times to forget all the secret misery of the twelve years; she had been almost happy, as nearly happy as it was possible for her to be. It seemed to her now that circumstances had been cruel. She should have been born a man; and as a man, with a freedom from all the world of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, she would have turned her mind to science. It was that sort of a mind; and it was only recently that she had come to believe it wasted ... frittered away on tiny, nonsensical things, things which in the end only ate into her own chance for happiness. In all her life there had been nothing which had taken possession of her—nothing save the barren, futile passion for her husband. Her life, she reflected, had been a wasted one. As a man, she would have been free ... free in the same fashion as Ellen Tolliver. She could have done as she liked, waiting upon no one. It seemed to her that her whole life had been spent in going from place to place, always in a tiny, expensive motor, arriving nowhere in the end. She was neither one thing nor theother; she had fallen somewhere between the sterility of Janey and Margaret Champion and the fierce activity of Ellen Tolliver.
Ellen Tolliver had been free, without background, without friends, alone, an adventuress (not at all in the evil sense) but one who had gone unhindered toward the thing which possessed her. Perhaps Ellen Tolliver would succeed now where she had failed. None, thought Sabine, knew the perils which lay ahead so well as herself and the old curiosity began to assail her; she wanted passionately to see Ellen Tolliver, to find out from her in any fashion possible, scrupulous or otherwise, what had happened in those months since she said good-by to Callendar and Thérèse. Perhaps Ellen saw him more clearly than herself; perhaps she had discovered his secret ... the nature of him. She had come to respect Ellen Tolliver.
The car halted. Amedé, neat and mustachioed, stood holding the door for her. With an effort of will she wrapped her fur cloak about her and stepped on to the pavement.
“Wait for me,” she said. “I may want you to carry some things. I’ll send Victorine when I want you.”
The big ornate house had the look of a place closed and deserted; the shutters were up and the shades drawn save in the entresol. At the door, Victorine, who had been clearly watching for her, stood waiting with a gleam in her eye which Sabine, from long association, was able to read. It was a look with which Victorine triumphantly announced household calamities. As Sabine stepped into the great hall, the housekeeper put her finger to her mustachioed lips and murmured, “Madame Callendar is here....” And then, with the air of turning the morsel about, she added, “TheyoungMadame Callendar.” And again, when her former mistress seemed not to be sufficiently shocked, she continued, “ThenewMrs. Callendar.”
For a moment Sabine stood hesitating, as if deciding whether to turn and run; it would have been an excellent excuse for never entering the house again. But far back in her consciousness, the old, insatiable curiosity gnawed and gnawed.
“Why has she returned?” she asked. “Where is Monsieur Callendar?”
Victorine shrugged her fat shoulders. “I don’t know, Madame. None of us knows anything. A cable came at noon to-day with the news that she was arriving ... to make things ready. I telephoned you.... I sent messages. The word came that you did not return for lunch and no one knew where you were.” With an air of drama, she said again, “The new Madame Callendar came in an hour ago.”
Sabine stood biting her crimson lips. If Ellen Tolliver had returned from Tunis, it was not likely that she would be going away soon, and it would be awkward to ask her permission to enter the house. Why had she returned? Why had Callendar not come with her? She turned to Victorine.
“Where is she now?”
“Resting,” replied Victorine, “in the boudoir.”
(That terrible room with the bearskin rugs and the mirrors sending back and forth innumerable reflections, as if the place were filled with a host of people ... a host of personalities all of whom were in the end contained within the flesh of the on-looker.... Many persons in each of us, thought Sabine. It was comic to think of Ellen Tolliver, so distinguished, so self-possessed, so cold, in the midst of all that cheap demi-mondaine splendor.)
“Are my things ready?”
“I was not sure, Madame, how many things you wished to take away with you. I got ready the things Iknew. There may be others.”
Sabine made her decision. “I will come in and get them now. Say nothing to Madame Callendar. If she’s resting, I’ll hurry away without her knowing that I’ve come.”
She slipped a ten franc note into the insinuating palm of Victorine who promptly said, “It’s good to see you again, Madame,” in a voice which carried another meaning—“We would much prefer you to the new Mrs. Callendar.”
Sabine ignored her. “And Monsieur Callendar?” she asked again.
“He did not return, Madame. Nothing was said of him.”
In the boudoir everhead Ellen lay, with her black dog by her side, staring resentfully at the reflections. She was unable to rest. Lying on the Egyptian chaise longue she surveyed the room and decided that she would have the indecent mirrors taken down to-morrow. She was certain that Sabine was not responsible for them; she suspected, out of the knowledge that had come to her in the past six months, that they were perhaps an idea of Callendar. They were unhealthy, she thought; all the house, for that matter, was unhealthy, even the hall and the glimpse of the darkened drawing room she had been able to snatch on her way up the marble stairs with the red plush rail. It was unhealthy to be stared at, accused day in and day out by these innumerable stupid reflections. It was, truly, an amazing house, and so like Thérèse. Why, she wondered, had Sabine not changed it? Sabine, with her faultless taste, her reserve, her ironic shell, must have hated it, always. Perhaps ... perhaps she had not dared to oppose him. Perhaps he too, like his mother, had been fond of the house. Perhaps he had looked at Sabine (smiling with his mouth but not his eyes) and said, “We will let it rest for the present. Some day ...” and so slipped away in that inexplicable, unconquerable fashion he had revealed in the villa at Tunis. Perhaps.... She began to understand a little of what Sabine’s life had been. Out of her own short, vivid experience, she was able to reconstruct bits of it, here and there. And Sabine had endured it for more than twelve years....
The mirrors put her nerves on edge. She loathed the reflections staring back at her from every wall. They were like faces peering in at her ... her own face repeated over and over again, tiresomely, for she was not vain and wasted no time over mirrors. No, she would have them down at once. If this wasto be her home, she would not be prevented by old Thérèse or Richard himself.
Her body ached from the fatigue of the journey from Marseilles yet it was impossible to rest. Her mind was awake, nervous, irritable, now angry, now frustrated, now cold and resolute, but always in its depths uncertain and muddled in a way it had never been before. Could it be that she was losing her grip upon life? That she was being swallowed up? Always she had known exactly what it was she wanted, what it was she would do. But now....
At length the restlessness became unbearable and, followed by the black dog, she rose and set out to explore the rest of the house. She went from room to room and returned at length to the stairway. The rooms, each one, were associated in some way with Thérèse, with Callendar, with Sabine. In her weariness and confusion, she could not drive them from her mind. They tormented her as she turned down the marble steps. She kept thinking of the night when Sabine had allowed Callendar and herself to drive home together from the house on Murray Hill. She understood now how wise Sabine had been, how subtle. She must have known then who it was that Callendar loved; she must have thought that in the end Callendar would never marry that struggling, gauche young girl who had fascinated him. Neither of them (she thought with satisfaction) had known the strength of that raw young girl. They had thought her, perhaps, stupid and unable to protect herself against such a rich and glamorous lover....
Half down the stairs, in the very midst of these thoughts, she was interrupted by the sound of voices which came from the drawing-room. The shutters had been opened and the curtains flung back and in the twilight which filtered through she saw dimly two figures bending over a little pile of bric-à-brac. The one was Victorine. The other figure was familiar—she could not say in what way. Halting for a moment she watched themand, as they became aware of her presence, the stranger turned toward her and she saw that it was Sabine, materialized, one might have said, out of her very thoughts.
She would have turned back, pretending she had seen nothing (perhaps Sabine would have hidden herself in a closet or behind a sofa, anywhere) but it was too late now. They had seen each other; they had stood for a time staring. It was impossible now to behave in any such idiotic fashion. Ellen smiled and, moving on down the stairs, was certain now of what she had suspected an hour earlier when the housekeeper greeted her—that old Victorine was devoted to the first Mrs. Callendar and looked upon herself as an intruder. Victorine, she fancied, had conspired to let Sabine into the house without announcing her.
Halting only to cuff Hansi and stop his growling, she crossed the great black and white squares of the tesselated hall and stepped into the drawing-room. She smiled and held out her hand.
“No one told me you had come in,” she said. “It’s pleasant to see you.... I arrived only an hour ago from Marseilles.”
She found herself taking Sabine’s hand. Their greeting was like one between two men, old friends—a symbol of the curious understanding which had existed between them since the very beginning. It seemed that they were neither friends, nor enemies, but something in between. They were always being thrown together, though neither would have said that she sought the company of the other.
Sabine laughed, with a disarming air of honesty. “I feel a fool,” she said, and then explained how it was she had to come in. “I took a chance of being able to escape without your knowing it, but I am an unlucky gambler. I’ve never had any luck. I’m sorry.” She laughed again and added, “I’ve no doubt (indicating Victorine) that she is enjoying it all immensely.”
It was true. Victorine stood riveted to the floor, her eyesbright with curiosity. Clearly she was confused and annoyed that they spoke English, which she could not understand.
“I’ll go then,” continued Sabine. “I shan’t steal anything which doesn’t belong to me.”
At this Ellen laughed. “I’ve seen nothing in the house that you mightn’t steal ... gladly, for all of me.”
“The boudoir ...” murmured Sabine with understanding as she gathered up her parcels. She might have added, “Callendar and Thérèse think it a beautiful house. It suits them.” But because she knew the remark would have a feline sound, she kept silent. Besides it was probable that Ellen already knew it, perfectly. She bade Victorine summon Amedé and when the housekeeper was gone, Ellen moved a little nearer and said in a low voice, “You mustn’t go. You must stay for a little time.... Stay for a cup of tea.”
But Sabine declined, protesting. “No.... I’ve a score of errands. I really must go ... and honestly it seems to me an absurd situation.”
Ellen laid one hand on her shoulder and, looking at her closely, repeated, “Youmuststay.... I must talk to some one.... There is so much to discuss.”
Slowly Sabine put down her parcels, subdued once more by the old curiosity. (How could she resist the promise of such revelations?) Amedé appeared to carry away the larger bundles and she said to him, “Wait for me. I’m having tea with Mrs. Callendar.”
And the eyes of Amedé grew as bright, as filled with curiosity as those of Victorine. In the hallway the housekeeper said to him with a grimace, “These Americans! What a cold blooded lot! The first wife and the second having tea in the husband’s house!”
In the little sitting room where a year ago Thérèse had swept the papers from the table into her untidy reticule, Sabine and Ellen settled themselves to talk, Ellen looking worn and tired, as if a part of her tremendous spirit had been subdued or hadslipped away from her, Sabine refreshed, worldly, elegant, mistress of herself ... the Sabine who had existed in the first days of the house on Murray Hill. The odd sense of comradeship persisted. It was the same spirit that had united them on the morning, long ago, when Sabine called at the Rue Raynouard, arriving as an enemy and departing as a friend. (She had been right in the instinct that led her into that call. Ellen belonged to him now, after all those years, as much of her as any mere process of law could deliver into his hands.)
It was Victorine who broke the precedent of fifteen years by bringing the tea with her own hands. Victorine, the housekeeper, the head of the entire ménage in the Avenue du Bois, bent her dignity, stepped down from her pedestal to carry a tea tray, because she feared that some morsel of fascinating interest might escape her ears. How could she resist this spectacle? This occasion? This friendly encounter (“Figure-toi,” she would say in the servants’ hall) between the two wives of her master. These Americans....
But she strained her ears and summoned in vain a youthful uncertain memory of English, for neither of the wives said anything of importance while she was in the room. They discussed the lateness of the spring, and even the political conditions, as if there were nothing at all extraordinary in the situation. (The cabinet, said the new Mrs. Callendar, in which M. de Cyon had served, was gone to the wall and all his gentle intrigues come to nothing.)
When Victorine, having exhausted all the possibilities of delay by poking and fussing over the tea tray, was forced by decency to quit the room, Sabine rose and said, “I know the habits of Victorine. She is at this minute standing outside the door.”
To prove it she walked quickly to the door and, flinging it open, saw Victorine sidle away with a pompous air of having many duties upon her mind.
“She has listened like that before ... many times. It is her curiosity and one can’t blame her for that. If I had been borna servant I should have spent all my time at keyholes. All the same she should have been sent away long ago. One has only to shoo her off whenever there is anything important in the air.”
It was her way of opening a discussion for which she hungered with a violence that made the curiosity of Victorine pale in comparison. But Ellen said nothing. She poured the tea and continued to talk of politics and the spring. It was not easy for her, who had never confided in any one. She sat behind the tea tray in the amazing, baroque room conscious that she was in the midst of a fantastic situation, yet unable to take one step in the direction she desired. She looked tall and handsome and dignified, but a little sad and weary. It was the sadness which conveyed to Sabine what was in the air.
“And Richard,” she asked abruptly. “How is he?”
“I have left him,” Ellen replied slowly, “for a time, at any rate.”
She spoke with her eyes cast down, as if it shamed her to confess that she had not made of the marriage a complete success. She pretended to be busily engaged with the flame beneath the silver teakettle. “I do not know whether I shall go back. I am thinking it out ... trying to decide.”
Sabine, too wise to interrupt, lighted a cigarette, threw back her fur coat and waited.
“I have to decide, you see, between two things.... Between myself and him, you might say. Or better perhaps, whether I shall exist only in relation to him.” She looked up suddenly, with an air of assurance which must have fascinated Sabine, who sat thinking of Ellen as she had been in the days of Murray Hill. “It is not only my music ... my career. He hates that and he hates it because, in spite of anything he can do, I shall always be known to the world as Lilli Barr and not as Mrs. Callendar. I think he forgot to take that into consideration. He is very confident, very sure of himself.”
Sabine still smiled faintly.
“I think you understand what it is I mean. I have beenmarried only six months but I realize that one of us must die ... either Lilli Barr or Mrs. Callendar. I am trying to decide which it must be. It is hard because both of them are very much alive and neither of them is still in her first youth. That’s what makes it difficult. I don’t know whether it is worth while to kill Lilli Barr in order that Mrs. Callendar may live and (she made a wry face) be all that is to be expected of a lady in her position ... the wife of Richard Callendar. I fancy you understand what I mean.” She leaned forward and asked, “Will you have another cup?... No?”
She discussed the problem coldly, with an air of utter detachment; these two creatures—Lilli Barr and the second Mrs. Callendar—might have existed without any relation to herself. Sabine, understanding perhaps that it was only in such a fashion that she was able to discuss the affair at all, took her cue and said, “The first Mrs. Callendar is dead. She has been dying for some months, but she is dead, completely dead. And Sabine Cane is alive again, more alive than she has ever been ... and free. My God! How free!”
For a time Ellen sat thoughtfully staring into the fire and when at length she spoke, it was to say, “Ah! I know what you mean by being free. I know perfectly. I can imagine what it must have been.... I’ve seen it myself.”
And while she talked thus, calmly, with the one woman in the world who had every reason to hate her, a woman whom she had defeated but who still seemed in some outlandish fashion a friend and ally, she kept seeing the villa and the white-walled garden in Tunis. She kept seeing her husband (who had once been Sabine’s husband) walking up and down in the cool of the evening, a few feet from her chair yet as remote as if he had been on the opposite side of the white desert beyond the walls. She saw him walking and smoking and ignoring her, his strong brown hands clasped behind him, absorbed always in some mystery which had nothing to do with her, and yet conscious (he must have been conscious) of a shadowy conflict that would neithervanish nor be pinned down—a man who shut her out of his existence and yet treated her as a possession. She kept seeing the handsome face, the curved red lips, the finely arched nose, the dark mustaches and above all the cold, gray, unfathomable eyes. (If only once he had given way for a moment. If only once that inhuman aloofness had melted, not into a fierce, glowing passion, but into a touching, simple affection....)
“I know what it is,” she repeated slowly. “I wondered sometimes ... in the long evenings, how you endured it. And I wondered too whether I should ever be able to endure it. You see, the difficulty is that I have no time now to experiment. I must decide. If I gave twelve years of my life, I should be....” She thought for a second. “I should be forty-seven. I dare not risk failure at that age. That would be unbearable because there would be nothing ahead.” Again she was silent for a time and then murmured, “I wanted to talk with you. I should have come to you if we had not met here.... I could not have helped it. It was impossible to talk of him with any one who has not known him ... who has not lived with him. Such a person could not understand what he was like....”
Sabine sat on the edge of her gilt chair, hungrily, with the air of a woman whose most passionate desire was at last being satisfied. For years she had waited. Only once before—on the morning she called at the Rue Raynouard—had she even spoken of the thing. She had said on that occasion, “You know my husband ... a little. So you can guess perhaps a little of the story.” (It was a different Sabine who sat here saying, “My God! How free!”)
The cigarette had burned until it scorched her gray gloves. “But it is different with you. He is in love with you. He never loved me. It was you that he loved always. I know that.” And with a pained ironic smile, she added, “Sabine Cane dares say what Mrs. Callendar could not even think.”
Outside the house the twilight had come down gently over thetrees in the little park. Beside Sabine’s tiny motor, Amedé waited, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Belowstairs Victorine regaled the servants’ hall with an embroidered description of what she had witnessed, but when pressed for details became vague and unsatisfactory.
Sabine stirred and murmured: “Besides, I don’t fancy you are entirely.... How shall I say it? I don’t wish to be offensive.... I don’t fancy perhaps that you are completely in love with him. I mean that you have not lost your head. If you gave him up, it would not be the end of everything....”
Ellen sat up very straight, her mouth almost hard. “No,” she said. “It would not be the end of everything!” And then relaxing a bit, she continued, “No. But I am in love with him. I do love him. I can’t describe it.... It’s a kind of hypnotism.”
It was impossible to be angry with Sabine. She was so calm, so obviously honest; it was impossible not to respect that incredible passion for the truth.
“I know what it is ... I know,” murmured Sabine thoughtfully.
“I think at times that I could give him up,” and Ellen snapped her fingers, “like that ... quickly, without a qualm, without so much as a backward look, and then something reaches out and takes possession of me, and in the next moment I know it is impossible. Once you are entangled, it is not easy to be free.” She threw her cigarette half-smoked into the mouth of the fireplace, a monstrous, ornate affair out of all proportion to the room. “My God!” she added with a quick passion. “What is it that he does to us?... To women like you and me, who are intelligent women, independent ... not fools? What is it he does to most women? I have seen them in the hotel at Tunis looking at him. I have seen that look come into his eyes....”
Sabine put down her teacup, leaned forward and said, “It is an animal thing ... what he does to us. If we are to be honest, it is that. You see, women like you and me never think of that.... We take it for granted there is no such thing....But there is, just the same. It is in all of us who are women at all. The power he possesses is the power of most men multiplied many times.... Latin women, who are more honest, can deal with it.... French women ... some French women ... are cynical and rational.... And they are better protected than ourselves, because they know what they are about.... A woman like old Thérèse could never have been hurt by him. They are protected from suffering, at least a certain kind of suffering. They would not be caught as we have been ... stupidly.”
French women! (thought Ellen). There was Madame Nozières. Had it protected her? Still, her suffering had not been of this sort. It was a different thing. What Sabine said about women like themselves was true. Somehow Sabine had cleared the air. She (Ellen) had always thought of him thus in the moments when her head had been quite clear ... as an animal, a handsome, docile cat. It explained too why she had always had a small, secret terror of him; why she had always been shocked by the fierceness of his love. When he had come to her in the Babylon Arms the distaste had not been so strong; but he had been more fresh then, less conscious of what he was. When he returned to her, it was with the freshness gone, with the romance worn away so that only the other thing showed through, naked yet fascinating to a woman who (she was honest with herself) ... a woman who had never known anything but the timid, pitiful love of Clarence.
And there was one thing she could not endure—that she, Ellen Tolliver, the part of her which she had guarded so jealously, should ever be destroyed by losing control over her own body.
And again she kept seeing him, dark and secret, this time as he sat across from her at the table in the small white room overlooking the Mediterranean, with the old sense of conflict rising sharply between them. She was conscious of watching him, as he watched her, of wondering how long she could go on thus, imprisoned. She saw again the gray eyes watching her, stubbornly, as if she were a proud animal which they had set themselves tosubdue. It was all confused and hateful because one could never know what he was thinking—whether behind those opaque gray eyes there were thoughts of love or of hatred. There were no intimacies of feeling, or even of taste. He was not a husband such as Fergus would have been, eager and naïvely honest, not stolid and dependable like Robert.... He was not like any man she could think of. He was an alien ... an outsider. She remembered the taunt Rebecca had flung at her, “He is marrying you only to break your will ... to destroy you. He has waited all these years.”
But he had not done it! He had not done it! There were times when she hated only and felt powerful and strong, but times too when her strength oozed from her, leaving her only a poor, silly, feminine creature eager to please and fascinate him—a contemptible creature like those women in the corridors of the hotel in Tunis. No, she would not be destroyed thus!
“Sometimes,” observed Sabine, in her cold, measured voice, “I think that men and women are born to be enemies, that even in the happiest of loves there is an element of conflict. One must possess and the other be possessed. There is no helping it. It seems to me that we are always fighting, fighting, to save the part of us which is ourself.”
She laughed. “Why, we’re doing it now, you know ... the two of us. Richard, you may say, is the embodiment of all that part of men which we can never bring ourselves to accept ... women like you and me.”
“We quarreled,” continued Ellen absorbed in her own trouble. “We had terrible scenes and terrible reconciliations. I am certain that he has already been unfaithful. In the end I came away, but until I stepped on the ship I was not certain that I had the courage.... Imagine that!... Imagine me not having the courage simply to go from one place to another. I did not tell him I was going until the morning I sailed. There was time then for a quarrel, but not time for a reconciliation, and so I got off.” She looked out of the window and continued in alow voice. “And now ... now I don’t know what I’m to do. I came here to this house because I am still his wife. I wanted time to think it over ... away from him. It would have been absurd to run away and hide like a schoolgirl.”
“He will not change,” observed Sabine. “I knew him for twelve years. He did not change.” She flicked the ash from her cigarette and sighed. “Still, in all that time, we never quarreled. He would never have quarreled over my leaving him.... You see, he did not care enough.”
It was quite dark now and the only light in the room came from the blaze in the huge fireplace. Sabine was drawing on her gloves. She gathered her fur cloak about her and set her small hat at exactly the right angle.
“Do you know the history of this house?” she asked. “It might interest you. You see, it was built originally by a German banker named Wolff to house his mistress. When he killed himself and she disappeared, it fell into the possession of the Callendars. Richard brought me here.... I followed the mistress in the possession of the boudoir ... and now it is yours.”
Ellen leaned back silently in her chair. There was something about this house which she had disliked since the moment she entered it ... something lush and Oriental. So it had been built by a German Jew to please his mistress and after that it had sheltered first Sabine and then herself! The history seemed in some way to throw a light upon her own confusion. The house, it appeared, still carried on its traditions. She and Sabine were ladies. It was impossible to know what the mistress had been. She was dead or retired now, no doubt, in some respectable quarter of a provincial town, or perhaps become the proprietress of a café, or a bad variety actress. It was fascinating to speculate upon what had become of her. What would happen to Sabine? What would happen to herself?
Sabine interrupted her thoughts by saying, “It is ridiculous for me in my position to give you advice. Besides, even if matterswere different I’m not sure that I’d do it. Advice means nothing and people seldom take it because they never tell the whole truth. There is always something which they keep concealed, and because it is concealed it is the most important element of all and influences them far more than anything an outsider can say.” She stood up and walked over to the fire. “No, there’s nothing I can say save that it would be a pity for the world to lose Lilli Barr. She is far more important than Mrs. Callendar, and in the end I think would be the happier of the two.”
Across the room Ellen watched the back of her visitor, speculating upon what she could have meant by the long speech. Was it possible that Sabine knew there was something she had not revealed? She grew suddenly jealous and suspicious. Had Sabine been too clever for her? Had all this strange feeling of an alliance between them been simply an illusion tricked up by a shrewd adversary? Did Sabine, standing there with her foot on the fender, fancy that if Callendar were free again she might have him back?
“You see, one of the complications,” she said quietly, “is that I am going to have a baby.”
At the announcement Sabine turned sharply, with a queer look in her eyes. Years before in this very room, she had made the identical speech to Callendar, and he had turned and kissed her with a new sort of tenderness. But the child had been a girl ... a poor, sickly little girl. Sabine closed her eyes, and turning, rested her head for a moment against the high mantelpiece. She had the manner of one who had been hurt suddenly.
“It is the heir they wanted,” she said sardonically.
“But it may be a girl.”
She smiled again, bitterly, and said, “Oh, no! I am certain it will be a boy. You have a genius for success, my dear. You were never a bad gambler. I’m certain you will not fail old Thérèse.”
At the door it was Victorine (who had been waiting in theshadows) who opened for them. The two Mrs. Callendars said good-by.
“There is only one thing ...” said Sabine. “I wonder whether he is really worth all this trouble and anxiety. When one thinks of the matter coldly, there is nothing to commend him. He has no virtues either as a husband or a lover. Sometimes I think him merely a stupid animal with immense powers of attraction.”
“But none of that makes any difference,” said Ellen. “That’s the queer thing! It never does.”
She watched Sabine until she saw her disappear into the tiny motor whose lights made two bright sparks in the spring darkness, and when she returned to the sitting room she knew suddenly that she had left Callendar for good. There was no longer any doubt about it. If she had not, in her heart, thought of him as a part of the past, she could not have talked as she did with Sabine. And Sabine had been right in knowing that there was something which she had concealed. It was this—that in the months spent in the Tunisian villa there had been moments when she fancied that her eyes were taking on the dumb, pleading look which had always been in the near-sighted eyes of Clarence. The memory came back to her now across all the years. He had beseeched her with his eyes for all that she could not give him, pled with her not to escape forever from his life. And what was his poor, pale love in comparison with this wild, devouring emotion that sometimes took possession of her? For Clarence was not dead yet; he still had the power of returning to her. The past, which she had tried always to forget, arose again and again. She even wondered sometimes what had become of poor, forlorn Mr. Wyck and those other figures, so dim now that they seemed to belong to some earlier life. She could see Clarence once more ... his pale, tormented eyes, his dumb adoration. It seemed to her that it was this adoration, this abasement which had been the essence of his whole existence.
No, she could not face such a thing!
Hansi, lying by the fire, watched her with his gold eyes while she paced up and down in wild agitation.
It was intolerable, loathsome, impossible that she should ever become possessed ... possessed as Clarence had once been. She had been free always and it was too late now to change.
She had dinner alone in the same room where she had talked with Sabine, and when she had finished she sent for Victorine and told her that she was leaving the house. If there were any messages (for she knew well enough that there would be, perhaps cable after cable) they could be forwarded to the Rue Raynouard where she would be with Madame de Cyon. She was returning now to Lily, as she had done so many times before.
A little before midnight she drove away for the last time from the house in the Avenue du Bois, having spent but ten hours of her life within its flamboyant walls. And by the time the taxicab arrived at Lily’s quiet, unobtrusive door her nerves were in a state of panic. She was filled with a dim sense of fleeing from some invisible, nameless thing as she had fled when a child through the dark halls of the house in Sycamore Street.
Lily and Hattie were waiting her, though she had sent no word of her coming. They were not surprised. There had been a cable from Tunis addressed to her, which they had opened and read,
“Sail to-morrow. R. C.”
After she had told them, abruptly and without explanation, that she had left Callendar forever, she locked herself in her room and looked at the cable again and again to make certain that she was not out of her senses. She had told him that she would stay at the house in the Avenue du Bois. How could he have known that she would escape so soon from that opulent, fleshly house to the refuge of Lily?
No, it was unbearable. One could not live with a man like that.